Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GRASSLEY. I would like to follow up on something that the Senator
from Pennsylvania just said on the process--not on the substance of
these amendments.

We are in a situation where we have a bill before the Senate that has
broad bipartisan support, and it came out of the committee I chaired,
the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a unanimous vote. Now we are stalled
on proceedings, and I would like to emphasize what is different and why
this bill should be moving forward in the year 2015 as opposed to the
last few years when the other political party controlled the Senate.

In the U.S. political system, elections are supposed to have
consequences, and as a consequence of the last election, there is a new
majority in the Senate. That new majority results from campaign
positions taken in the last election that if we had a new majority, the
Senate was going to be run in the way that James Madison implied that
it ought to run--as a deliberative body, as a body where every Member
could participate, where you would reach consensus, and where you give
very serious thought to legislation that comes before this body--and do
it in a way differently than the House of Representatives was meant to
do business and has done business for the 230 years under our
Constitution.

So we ran on a platform that we would have the Senate debate and be
open for amendments, and the leader announced that when this bill was
going to come up, it would be an open amendment process. Everybody
could participate. Now we are in a situation where the minority is not
allowing us to move forward on amendments because they have objections
to a provision that was in this bill since its introduction. Every
Member had not only days but weeks to consider it before it came out of
committee on a unanimous vote. And those provisions that were in this
bill from the introduction--and every Senator knew they were in there,
and every Senator's staff knew they were in there. If they didn't know
that this language was in there, then they didn't read the legislation.
There are plenty of people to read legislation around here, even beyond
the Members of the committee.

So this language deals with what is called the Hyde amendment, which
for either 39 or 40 years has basically said that taxpayers' money
should never be used to finance abortions. So all of a sudden there is
objection to that language in this bill, which was in the bill when the
very same Members who are objecting to it now on the floor of the
Senate knew it was in there, and we can't move forward because they
object to the amendment.

So I proposed to them that they offer an amendment to strike what
they don't like and find out where the votes are. If they win, they
win. If they don't win, we move forward. But you can't hardly hold up a
piece of legislation over language that is in the bill that has been
part of the law of this country for 39 or 40 years and then say that
you didn't know it was in there, when it was in there when you voted to
get it out of committee.

Senator Toomey just gave a speech about his amendment. He asked
unanimous consent to bring it up. The minority in the Senate, which has
the same right to offer amendments that any other Senator can offer,
refused to let him get a vote on his amendment or even disputed the
fact of laying an amendment aside to move forward on it. So we are at a
standstill.

Statistically, I would like to show how the new majority is intending
to operate the Senate on a different basis than had been operated on in
previous years and use statistics of last year. If the statistics are
off by 1 or 2 numbers, I hope somebody will forgive me. But roughly, we
had 18 rollcalls on amendments last year, because there was every
effort to be made to stall the Senate so amendments couldn't come up
for a vote. Already this year we have had approximately 40-some
rollcall votes on amendments, and more than a majority of those have
been amendments offered by the minority party in the Senate.

So the elections showed that people want the Senate to work as a
deliberative body, where every Senator can participate, and we ought to
move forward on that.

I would ask the people who object to moving forward on this amendment
to offer an amendment to strike the provisions they don't like and move
on so that the other several Members of the Senate who are stalled now
on offering their amendments can offer their amendments and eventually we can get through those amendments and vote on a bill that got out of the Senate Judiciary Committee without a single dissenting vote from either Republicans or Democrats.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source